You like James Bond movies, if you watch Skyfall, maybe you wondered, would a weird and spooky

stage
set they used in some scenes a concrete island with tumbledown houses and not a single tree or plant or
out the gloomiest place on earth you've ever seen for sure? Can it be real? In fact, it is. Welcome to
Hassiba. Josimar is an island nine miles from Nagasaki, is one of many hundreds of uninhabited islands
in Nagasaki prefecture. Unlike others, which are green and covered with forests, Josimar looks like bare
rocks with no plants on them.

If you look closer, you'll see that the rocks are actually empty. High risers standing on manmade coastal
banks. The key to the island's secret is in the coal mining. Sixteen and a half million tons of coal were
taken from the ocean's bottom up to the surface near Hassiba for its century long history. But in 1974, the
locals left the island forever. For many centuries, people living on Takashima, a big island not far from
Hossie mob, gathered coal which lay close to the surface.

They used it to heat their houses and called Go Hito. After the man who, as legend has it, accidentally
found its fuel qualities in the 18th and 19th centuries. Takashima Island was part of feudal lands
belonging to the fuq O'Hara family. They saw the profit that coal mining started to bring and took control
of all the bargains in their own lands. Islanders served as just a work force to them. And soon coal mining
became the basis of the local economy in the.

Nagasaki became an international port on the way to China and a way station for foreign commercial
cargoes. Great Britain, the USA and other Western countries were replacing their sailing ships with
steamers and demand for coal was growing. It made the fuko hori widen the territory of coal mining. They
approached a Scotch entrepreneur, Thomas B. Glover, for help. Till that time, the method of coal
extraction was very primitive. A miner had to cut pieces of coal from an open service with a Twi bill.

When coal was exhausted or the open casks got too deep and unsafe, they would just move to another
place. Glover brought modern British equipment and drifted a vertical coal mine to the island. Coal
reserves in 1869. The Drifters reached the depth of 150 feet and modern coal mining began in Japan.
Takashima Coal had a high quality and soon filled the treasury of Nagasaki with foreign currency fuko.
Hauri made up their mind to develop reserves on the neighbouring islands. And this is how a chain of
lifeless rocks called Josimar became a coal island, too.

At the end of the 19th century, they sold the island to Mitsubishi, which was a shipping enterprise. Then
the new owner built dwelling houses for workers and made tall fortifications which had the island looks
similar to a battleship gliding on the waves. The resemblance was so strong that a local newspaper
reporter called it Gunk on Sheema, the island of ships. The nickname soon displace the official name
from the spoken word. Josimar produced about 150000 tonnes of coal each year, and his population in
1916 was three thousand people.

It was then that Mitsubishi built a concrete residential complex to make up for shortfall of living space. It
was the first big concrete building in Japan. In fact, the first big concrete building in America. Engle's in
Cincinnati was built only 14 years earlier. So Posthumus Building was a front man of the new architectural
era in Japan. A six storey house built in the south of the island gave workers and their families small but
private apartments. Each of them consisted of a 106 square foot room with a Tommy bathroom.

Kitchen and laboratory were in public use. Two years later, an even bigger residential complex was built
on the centre of the island. It was the biggest in Japan, had nine stories from the ocean side and three
from the rock side. And it was only the beginning. A total of thirty concrete houses were soon built on the
island by 1941. The yearly production of coal in Hassiba reached 410000 tonnes and it kept growing. In
1959, the population of Hossie MA was over fifty two hundred.

The total square area of the island is six point three ha and 60 percent of it are rocky slopes where most
of the dwelling houses are built. Any level surface of the island was mainly used for facility buildings, so
the density of population on Höss Hilma was eight hundred thirty five people per hectare of the whole
island or fourteen hundred people per hectare of the residential area. Wow. These figures indicate the
highest density of population ever recorded in the world, even where Obbie, the bedroom district of Tokyo
and the most densely populated city, has only one hundred forty one people per hectare between
residential houses.

There were squeezed a primary school, a secondary school, a playground, a gym, a cinema, bars,
restaurants, 25 different stores and a Buddhist church. There were no motorized means of transportation
on the island because it would take less than 10 minutes to walk from one end of the island to the other.
Posthumus citizens had no umbrellas. As the maze of corridors and stairs connected all the dwelling
houses and served as a transport system, housing, electricity and water were free for workers.

But all the residents had to take part in public works and cleanup of the territory. As for food, clothes and
other articles of commerce, the community totally depended on the outer world. Fresh water also had to
be brought to the island before the tubes laid on the sea bottom connected Josimar with the reservoir on
the land in 1957. Any storm that stopped the sailing for more than a day posed a threat to living on
Hassiba. The most remarkable trade of this place was a total absence of the ground and plants.

Asima was nothing more than coal ash laid around a bare rock in 1963 as part of a green campaign. Has
Hema residents brought soil from the mainland and made gardens on the roofs? They started growing
vegetables and flowers there and the island started looking a bit less gloomy. But it wasn't for long. At the
end of the 1960s, Japanese economy skyrocketed and coal was admittedly an ecologically dirty fuel oil.
Soon replaced coal as the basis of national energy programs.

The government started shutting down coal mines around the country, and Hossie MA wasn't an
exclusion. The coal mining on the island had always been difficult because of the harsh climate. Storms,
earthquakes and tsunamis are common in this place and they had to keep restoring fortification walls all
the time. It took extra money and forces and posed a risk for people living on the island. Waves as high
as 30 feet would often fall on high simmer, turning its streets into a rough river.
Mitsubishi reduced staff on high CEMA retrained workers and sent them to other subsidiaries. By 1974,
there were about 2000 people left on the island, and on January 15th, 1974, the company officially
announced the closure of the mine. In three months, all the residents of Hossie My left the island forever
for the 84 years of its history. It produced about 16 and a half million tons of coal. Ozma now is an
abandoned and forgotten island, which looks as a strange lighthouse guarding the entrance to Nagasaki
Bay.

The modern state of the island is the result of climate influence. Nobody tried to destroy it on purpose, but
all the buildings look as if they suffered a military attack or stayed uninhabited much longer. The island
state is a warning about the importance of wise forecasting. This is what may happen when society gets
too far from nature. The whole world might look like this after the end of urbanization and exploitation of
resources. For many years, visits to the island were for bidden and punished with a deportation from
Japan.

This was a measure against thieves who had come to horsemen in search of things they could sell.
Things from a ghost town were in great demand among rich collectors. The island was rediscovered once
again in the 21st century and gayed a wild popularity, especially among those who are fond of ruins. It
started attracting tourists from the West, and in August 2005, it was officially open for journalist visits. In
September 2008, Josimar or Gun Can Jema Island was included in the list to get the status of UNESCO
World Heritage as a monument to a whole period of Japanese history.

Nagasaki Prefecture planned to make a kind of a park museum of the island, renovate the decaying
buildings and open it for tourists. But the project demanded huge resources, and it wasn't fully put into
place since April 2009. There are regular steamer cruises to the island and around it from Nagasaki.
Tourists can come to Hassiba, but access is open only to part of the island, which is specially equipped
for visits and considered safe. Any attempts to search the island by oneself and leave the tourists route
are dangerous.

No wonder that this scenic island was used as a location for shooting movies. In 2009, it was the location
for the TV series Life After People as a living example of what happens to a city left by people 35 years
ago. And in 2011, some of the most thrilling and sinister scenes of Skyfall were also filmed here. So
would you like to see with your own eyes what happens to cities uninhabited by people? Let me go down
in the comments.

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